Control and value appraisals and online multiple‐text comprehension in primary school: The mediating role of boredom and the moderating role of word‐reading fluency

Abstract

Background. Online multiple-text comprehension is a key skill of the 21st Century, yet the study of its relations with boredom in young students has been disregarded. Boredom is an achievement emotion expected to be predicted negatively by antecedents like control and value appraisals and to be associated to a negative performance. Notwithstanding its documented domain-specificity, scarce attention has been paid to investigating these relations with primary-school students in the reading domain, and specifically for online multiple-text comprehension, and to how such relations are moderated by basic cognitive abilities.Aims. Considering separately two settings (homework, test), we studied the mediation of boredom in the relation between control-value appraisals and online multiple-text comprehension in primary-school students, focusing on the moderating role of wordreading fluency.Sample. Participants were 334 fourth and fifth graders.Methods. We evaluated students' reading-related self-efficacy and task-value, readingrelated boredom for homework and tests, word-reading fluency, and online multiple-text comprehension.Results. Path analyses revealed negative relations between control-value appraisals and boredom for homework and tests, and between boredom and online multiple-text comprehension for tests only. For the latter, word-reading fluency moderated the relation between appraisals, boredom, and comprehension: Boredom negatively related to comprehension only for students with high word-reading fluency.Conclusions. Findings are discussed focusing on antecedents of online multiple-text comprehension as a literacy skill critical in the 21st Century. We underlined theirThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Who’s bored in school?

“…Students with higher levels of interest reported lower levels of boredom than their less interested peers. These associations were found for boredom in mathematics as well as in German class and provide further empirical support that students' interest is critically important for students' boredom in primary school (see Putwain et al 2018;Raccanello et al 2022).…”

“…Although the beginning of formal schooling is enormously important for students' emotional experience of learning and schooling, empirical research that has investigated academic boredom, its causes, and its consequences during primary school is still scarce . The assumptions of control-value theory concerning the importance of control and value appraisals for academic boredom should be as relevant in primary school as previously demonstrated for older samples (see, e.g., Putwain et al 2021;Raccanello et al 2022). Already in primary-schoolaged children, boredom has been found to be negatively associated with intrinsic value and control appraisals (Putwain et al 2021) as well as academic achievement (Raccanello et al 2019).…”

“…Whereas there is research on the link between general cognitive ability and academic boredom (see above), to date, value appraisals have been neglected in this line of research. However, previous research has shown that students who value a task for intrinsic (e.g., interest) or extrinsic reasons (e.g., extrinsic rewards) are less likely to feel bored (e.g., Putwain et al 2018;Raccanello et al 2022).…”

The Efficacy of Positive Education Intervention for Academic Boredom and Intrinsic Motivation among College Students: A Quasi-Experimental Study

“…While educational psychologists have long been interested in the research of academic motivation, it is only recently that they have been interested in the study of academic emotions [ 1 ]. The cognitive-motivational paradigm focuses on academic emotions that have a favorable or negative influence on academic results, such as achievement, motivation, and deep-level cognitive learning techniques [ 2 ].…”

Boredom Intervention Training Phase I: Increasing Boredom Knowledge through a Psychoeducational Video

“…Although the literature on boredom during the COVID-19 pandemic in postsecondary settings is still developing, research on students ranging from primary school to college levels, who were forced to homeschool as a result of the pandemic, found that students who were highly prone to boredom perceived their homeschooling to be more challenging, which subsequently lowered their adherence to learning at home [ 9 ]. Thus, boredom likely has a negative impact on students’ learning in at-home and online learning settings [ 10 ], making it an important emotion to study during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced many students to learn remotely.…”